Financial Times: Germany’s coronavirus anomaly: high infection rates but few deaths

The apparent anomaly has sparked debate in Germany and beyond, though experts warn against drawing sweeping conclusions. They argue that the country’s low fatality rate most likely reflects the fact that the outbreak is still at a relatively early stage, and that the age profile of those affected has so far been younger than that in other countries. Younger patients without previous ailments have a much better chance of surviving Covid-19 than elderly patients.

Another factor that may help explain the variance is the unusually high number of tests being carried out in Germany. According to Lothar Wieler, the president of the Robert Koch Institute, German laboratories are now conducting about 160,000 coronavirus tests every week — more than some European countries have carried out in total since the crisis started. Even South Korea, which is conducting 15,000 tests a day and has been held up by virologists as an example to follow, appears to be testing less than Germany. [...]

In the short term at least, mass testing feeds through into a lower fatality rate because it allows authorities to detect cases of Covid-19 even in patients who suffer few or no symptoms, and who have a much better chance of survival. It also means that Germany is likely to have a lower number of undetected cases than countries where testing is less prevalent. Indeed, one notable feature of the coronavirus outbreak in Germany so far is the high number of relatively young patients: according to data from the Robert Koch Institute, more than 80 per cent of all people infected with the coronavirus are younger than 60. [...]

Last week, the federal government ordered an extra 10,000 life-saving ventilators from a German manufacturer, on top of the 25,000 that are already in place in hospitals across the country. The city state of Berlin, which has so far recorded 391 cases of Covid-19, is converting parts of the local trade fair ground into a 1,000-bed hospital for future coronavirus patients. Similar steps have been taken across the country.

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WorldAffairs: How Taiwan Contained COVID-19 + Global News

Taiwan is just 81 miles from mainland China, but it has managed to prevent an outbreak of the rapidly spreading COVID-19 disease. Stanford University’s Dr. Jason Wang explains how Taiwan acted quickly, aggressively and strategically to prevent the type of outbreaks and death rates we’re now seeing around the world. We also hear from William Yang, Taipei correspondent for Deutsche-Welle. Today’s unrelenting coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic can feel overwhelming. Though it may seem like the world around us has come to a stop, major global events march on. Stories about U.S. airstrikes against an Iran-backed militia in Iraq and Vladimir Putin’s new plan to become president for life may not be front page news today, but they will inevitably demand our attention soon.

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Failed Architecture: How The Urban Eclipsed The City: An Interview With Ross Exo Adams

Urbanisation is not and has never been entirely about cities. Beginning with the earlier colonial practices of spatial planning and its projections onto the supposedly “open” spaces of newly settled land, and continuing as a project to establish one continuous global system of social, political and economic control, “the urban” has now decisively eclipsed the city, encompassing the entirety of our planet—such that we can even talk about the urbanisation of the oceans. [...]

I describe the urban as a fundamentally new way to organise and control space, and what happens in it—a political technology that emerged sometime in the nineteenth century in Europe. By this term, I mean to describe two parallel processes we see happening in this period: on the one hand, the broad reorganisation of space across a range of major cities in Europe and, on the other, the deployment of new administrative, legal and political means by which to manage the people who had come to occupy these spaces. [...]

What I suppose I would like people to know about Cerdá is that, in my view, he provided the first and perhaps clearest account of the urban as it arose around him in Europe. This reading requires a bit of interpretive generosity since Cerdá’s project was of course not an “account” per se, but rather a proposal for a space yet to come—a space which he believed he had invented outright. Although he did invent the term urbanización, I see his work as more of a diagram that reveals how space, movement and the control of bodies could be planned for the first time.

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Visual Capitalist: Visualizing the History of Pandemics

Disease and illnesses have plagued humanity since the earliest days, our mortal flaw. However, it was not until the marked shift to agrarian communities that the scale and spread of these diseases increased dramatically.

Widespread trade created new opportunities for human and animal interactions that sped up such epidemics. Malaria, tuberculosis, leprosy, influenza, smallpox, and others first appeared during these early years.

The more civilized humans became – with larger cities, more exotic trade routes, and increased contact with different populations of people, animals, and ecosystems – the more likely pandemics would occur.

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BBC: The plan to turn half the world into a reserve for nature

One of the major reasons for adoption of these extreme preservation goals is a 2019 report by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), which found that more than 1 million species are at risk of extinction. Conducted by hundreds of researchers around the world, the study is considered the most comprehensive analysis of the state of the world’s biodiversity ever. [...]

The ambitious goal of protecting and restoring natural systems on a large scale is shared by a number of groups and people. The Wyss Campaign for Nature is working in partnership with the National Geographic Society to support the goals of the so-called “30x30” movement, a highly ambitious initiative that aims to protect 30% of the planet, on land and at sea, by 2030. [...]

The European Parliament has pledged to protect 30% of European Union territory, restore degraded ecosystems, add biodiversity objectives into all EU policies, and earmark 10% of the budget for improvement of biodiversity. In the US, politicians working with conservation organisations recently introduced a resolution to drum up support for protection of 30% of the US’s land and marine areas.[...]

The ambitious goals of campaigns like 30x30 and Half Earth have been met with criticism. Some question whether focusing on saving up to half of the land’s surface will do much for protecting the remaining biodiversity. In a 2018 paper, Stuart Pimm, a conservation biologist at Duke University, and others, argued that most biodiversity occurs in tropical regions, and much of it is already fragmented. They wrote how protecting broad swaths of nature in largely untouched regions – such as Canada’s boreal forest – has benefits. But the remaining large wild landscapes are mostly in temperate regions, which won’t do much for protecting biodiversity because by far most of the world’s species are in the tropics. “This begs our question of how much biodiversity will we protect if the trend to protect wild places continues,” says Pimm.

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